Sitting in a room filled with ambitious, energetic, and powerful business leaders, there’s one sound you don’t expect to hear: silence. I’ve been in that room. In mid-Q4. And after more than 20 years of doing this, that silence is the only consistent thing I’ve heard.
A business leader asks me to help them navigate an infrastructure conundrum that’s turned their operations sideways in November. So, I show up and begin asking the hard questions.
The first thing I look for? Who goes quiet. They’re the ones who have something to say.
But what happens when everyone shuts down?
This tells me the team has reached what they think is the point of no return when in fact it’s really the turning point. A turning point that revolves around patterns.
Patterns are directions that we follow to get desired outcomes. They are recurring signals that point to what’s likely to happen next. They’re the ‘do this, not that’ signals every business looks for.
Over the years, I’ve seen plenty of patterns, or recurring conditions, that give me clues as to what’s going to happen next. And some are right out in the open. When Christmas rolls around, I know people buy more products.
It happens every year. Without fail.
That’s a pattern that is tangible and easily recognized. Yet some patterns are more subtle, making them difficult to spot. This is especially challenging for businesses that miss them and are suffering the negative consequences without understanding where they came from or what caused them.
Take product business leaders who notice in Q4 that the relationships between customers, suppliers, and operation teams are breaking down. They know that something, somewhere isn’t working. And it’s not because it’s Q4.
That’s just the timeframe.
At the end of the year, when tensions are high and business is (hopefully) booming, patterns are exposed. Problems that have been bubbling for months finally reach the surface and burst.
This is why it’s critical to pay attention to patterns before Q4 gets here. And I can guarantee that if businesses start looking for patterns, they’ll find them.
Inventory discrepancies are the bane of every product business. They show up in customer complaints and supplier conversations before they appear in any report.
An order ships short. A product listed as in stock isn't. A replenishment order arrives late because the signal came late.
The downstream effect lands on relationships first, not dashboards. Customers feel it. Then suppliers. The operations team is often last to know. Inventory accuracy is a trust signal, not just a metric.
Worst of all? Mistakes in inventory counts are self-reinforcing: inaccuracy triggers more manual checking, which adds labor and lag, which makes the inaccuracy worse.
These are the unpleasant effects stemming from inventory inaccuracies, but here’s the important part: the inventory mismatch that becomes visible in November was usually present in August, just not yet large enough to cause a complaint.
The business that caught it did a quiet reconciliation and found a gap between platform count and warehouse count nobody had flagged. The business that didn't catch it found out when a customer was already waiting, eroding their confidence with every day that passes.
How can I tell when a business is suffering from inventory that doesn’t add up? I notice team members carefully avoid directly answering this question: "How confident are you in that number?”
A non-answer tells me everything I need to know.
Just like when I discover that the customer service team already has an informal workaround folder for this exact complaint.
Every business has workarounds. A spreadsheet reconciling two platforms. A manual step before orders reach the warehouse. A weekly export one person cleans before it's usable.
At low volume, a mild annoyance. At Q4 volume, a bottleneck with a person attached to it.
When I walk into a business in November and realize the thing holding the operation together is a spreadsheet owned by one person now working very long hours, I know this isn't a workaround anymore. It’s infrastructure, and infrastructure fails under load.
Each one made sense when it was created, which is why nobody questioned it. The workarounds accumulate invisibly, and by the time two or three fail at once under peak volume, nobody remembers how dependent on them the operation had become.
The telltale sign that I’ve correctly assessed the problem? Asking "What happens if this person is out?" and suddenly everyone forgets how to speak. The opportunity to ask that same question was available in July. Nobody asked.
The not asking, or not going deeper, is a pattern. One that I see in other equally as important areas, like reporting.
Operational dashboards are designed to give leaders a centralized view of everything going on. Sales orders, inventory levels, and customer support needs are right at their fingertips. This truth-telling dashboard looks fine until someone drills in.
A leader pulls a report to make a buying decision or update a board, and the number in front of them doesn't match what the warehouse or their dashboard is saying. This previously unforeseen inventory inaccuracy is the pattern that shakes leadership confidence hardest. Not because the operation is broken but because nobody knows how broken it is.
Here’s the thing. Fragmented systems don't just create operational problems. They create information problems, and those are hardest to see until someone urgently needs the number to be right. The reports that tend to fail first? Stock on hand, sell-through by channel, reorder status across locations.
Operating in the dark, finding out that inventory isn’t what or where it should be, leads to confusion for the team and loss of confidence by the customer. But it didn’t (and doesn’t) have to be this way.
The gap visible in November was usually present in August. In August nobody needed the number urgently, so the discrepancy sat there unchallenged. Until a planned audit or a mid-crisis scramble. Then the discrepancy became a glaring problem no one could sweep under the rug.
There were signals. Two people quietly cross-checking numbers on their own laptops during a meeting instead of saying anything out loud, or a leader pausing a beat too long before answering a question about a number they should be sure of.
And the signals were ignored.
Business struggles aren’t caused by Q4. They’re the result of businesses overlooking patterns and compensating for bad processes, a weak system design, or low-trust data for months. Q4 is just the point in time when everything falls apart. Very loudly.
If you’ve seen a concerning signal or noticed a potentially alarming pattern but are second guessing yourself, a word of advice: don’t wait until Q4 to prove yourself right. The best way to fix yesterday’s problem is to take action today. Read Cin7’s Peak Season Playbook for step-by-step instructions on how you can turn Q4 into a boon, not a bust. And reach out to us at Four13. As a Cin7 partner, we can show you how to treat small inconsistencies as signals before volume turns them into consequences.